Russian rocket fails to reach target orbit

2012-08-07 08:36

Moscow - Russia's federal space agency says an unmanned rocket and its payload of two communications satellites failed to reach the orbit, the latest in a series of failures that have dogged Moscow's space programme.

Roscosmos said on Tuesday that a secondary booster module of the Proton-M rocket carrying Russian and Indonesian satellites switched off earlier than expected minutes after late Monday's takeoff from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Last August, Russia lost contact with a communications satellite shortly after a Proton-M launch. In 2007, a Proton-M carrying a Japanese communications satellite crashed.